“Wandering in the wilderness” is a literary metaphor that represents a period of uncertainty, confusion, and isolation. It’s a period of personal struggle and searching for direction, hoping to find the next step that will lead you out of that place where you’re lost, without a clear path forward.
It’s common to feel this way after a loss, a disappointment or setback, but I can’t seem to claw my way out of this deep hole.
I was certain that goodness would overcome evil and America would enter a golden age of equality, fairness, and concern for justice and the rule of law.
I was wrong.
I’m in good company nonetheless—Jesus, the Israelites, Thoreau, Diogenes, Kerouac, and various Brahmanic, Jaina, and Buddhist aesthetes …all wandered aimlessly in the vast emptiness searching for answers. They suffered. They searched. They were defeated. They moved on.
Ken Kesey, American novelist and countercultural figure, once said, “The answer is never the answer.” And that’s because things (life, politics, policymaking, current events, and personalities) keep changing.
We don’t know what Democrats and Progressives are doing to stave off our collapse, while we wring our hands. Maybe it is better that we don’t. The only certainty is that life will change for the worse after January 20th. We must get ready, prepare, and hunker down.
All of us are hungry for beauty, certainty, security and love. But if we attain it, it’s only temporary.
Life ultimately offers no happy endings. In the end, we become old and infirm, dependent on others, we die, and loved ones die. In the process, the world (and the language) becomes unfamiliar and unrecognizable. Your best hope is that you die painlessly, suddenly and quickly; avoiding prolonged suffering and pain.
Probably one of the greatest closing lines in American literature was penned by F. Scott Fitzgerald, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past”.
Our goal seems ever more distant.
